DRUG ADDICTS GET SECOND CHANCE

JAKARTA (JP): He is only 21 years old but the story of his life is enough
to fill up a book of a thousand and one pages.

Till the age of 15 he was a happy-go-lucky teenager of a middle-class
family in Jakarta. Then one of his friends introduced him to ganja, or
marijuana, after an innocent game of basketball.

"That one moment changed my entire life, forever. I could not do without it
anymore. When I did not find ganja I took tranquilizers, Valium..." recalls
the youngster, who does not want his real name to appear in print. He
agreed to be called Fisherman instead.

Soon he was introduced to ecstasy, the designer drug that promises instant
gratification but wrecks entire lives, at a nightclub in Blok M. After that
came other drugs like shabu-shabu and putauw.

From once a week, Fisherman took to popping pills four times a week. If
there was cocaine around he took that as well, along with LSD. He was not
terribly choosy about his drinks either, as long as it was alcohol.

"I cannot explain to you what it is like to be on drugs. It is another
world. It cannot be appreciated by anyone except junkies like myself," says
Fisherman, one of 37 patients at Wisma Adiksi, a therapeutic center in
south Jakarta. Before he had turned 20, it seemed that Fisherman had
already spent an entire millennium in masochism with just sporadic
illusions of merriment.

For once the effect of the drug is over then it is hell, warns Fisherman.
Addicts suffer from extreme paranoia, anger and insomnia. There is
excruciating pain in the bones, high fever and a total sense of helplessness.

Even though he admits to still liking the effects of drugs, he wants to
give up the habit. He wants to cure himself of is the power that drugs have
over him, the total dependency that drugs demand of the addict. It is just
too degrading, he says. He wants to be in control of his life and is trying
to look for happiness in a more meaningful sense of the word. He realizes
now that his dignity is far more important to him than dreams that drugs
offer for brief moments. He has already lost too many opportunities, he feels.

Fisherman's parents sent him to study business management in Melbourne,
Australia, but he was caught and disgraced by the police, who deported him
back to Indonesia early last year.

Fisherman has been detoxified twice, but he hopes that his year-long stay
at Wisma Adiksi will also give him the moral and spiritual strength to say
no to his craving for drugs.

After his cure, he plans to return to the campus, but to study psychology
this time.

"I am more interested in getting to know people and what goes on inside the
mind," says Fisherman. However two other 20-year-old boys in the same
rehabilitation program as Fisherman are not as lucky, as the amount of
drugs they have consumed has reduced them to pathological cases.

"If drug addicts get help early enough they do recover. But sometimes it is
too late," explains Jugantara Salmun, 30, the manager at Wisma Adiksi.

Wisma Adiksi was opened here a year ago by Dr. Al-Bachri Husein, a
psychiatrist who has been working with drug addicts since 1974.

Jugantara was himself a junkie till about a decade ago. He was sent to a
therapeutic community in Ipoh, Malaysia, to be cured of his addiction. He
started to smoke marijuana when he was 14. The second child of a West Java
banker, Jugantara remembers being a bit lost after the birth of his little
brother 13 years after him.

"I did not know where I belonged. I was confused," he says, adding that he
blames no one for his misdeeds as his parents were always very loving
toward all their three sons.

"I come from a very close-knit family but at that time I think I was
looking for a niche for myself. I had these rich friends at school who
bought morphine and gave it to me free of charge. Life became one big
party. I liked it. But by the time I was 18 I had had enough. I was
unhappy. The niche I had created for myself made me feel empty, useless. I
wanted to get rid of the shame I was living with."

Luckily Jugantara was a good student. He was able to graduate eventually,
to find a job and a wife, and now that he is the father of two children he
considers it a sin even to think of taking drugs.

Although the temptation sometimes returns. When his father died recently
his first thought was to numb his sorrow with a dose of drugs. But he is
strong enough today to be able to resist the lethal temptation. As for his
school buddies who first introduced him to drugs, he does not know where
they are today, and says he does not care whether they are dead or alive.

Jugantara got to know Dr. Bachri 16 years ago when he first went for
counseling. "In fact, he still counsels me as my boss in this place,"
smiles Jugantara, who increasingly feels there should be a decent community
center to care for drug addicts in Jakarta, so Indonesians would not have
to travel all the way to Malaysia and Singapore for treatment.

He was happy to see Yayasan Titihan Kespati open last year with 10
patients. Today 70 men and 30 women receive treatment there.

Jugantara first worked as a counselor at Titihan Kespati along with seven
experts from New York before joining Wisma Adiksi, which treats 37
patients. Twenty-eight are enrolled in the six-month primary phase, while
nine have returned for the second six months of treatment.

The program offered at Wisma Adiksi follows the 12 steps and 12 traditions
of Narcotics Anonymous (NA), the community-based international association
for the recovery of drug addicts. Started in 1947 as part of a U.S. federal
hospital program, today NA has nearly 20,000 registered weekly meetings in
70 countries around the world.

Jugantara feels that the problem of drug addiction in Indonesia is very
grave, but is under-reported. Some people think there may be as many as 2
million drug addicts in Jakarta itself. International agencies working with
drug control tend to ignore the problem in Indonesia as it is not a major
producer of narcotics, nor a major narcotics-derived money laundering center.

However, the country is being increasingly used as a transit point for
Southeast Asian heroin, including for shipment to other parts of the world.
In recent years the sale and consumption of ecstasy, methamphetamines (such
as shabu-shabu) and traditional narcotics like marijuana has become
alarmingly widespread, especially in urban areas such as Jakarta.

To resolve this grave problem Fisherman offers a simple solution. His
message, especially to young people is, "Don't -- ever -- even start, for
you may never be able to stop."